Sapphire's Atomic brand often sprung up some surprising products in the VGA space, including some of the very first graphics cards with factory-fitted liquid-cooling solutions. Its latest creation is the Atomic 990FX, a socket AM3+ motherboard in the ATX form-factor, with a full-coverage water-block. "Full coverage and motherboards?" you ask? Yes! This board features a full-coverage block that features coolant channels that pass through not just the CPU, but also CPU VRM, and the chipset. It features three PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, four DDR3 DIMM slots, six SATA 6 Gb/s ports, gigabit Ethernet, and 8-channel audio.

You'd really need to have the graphics card(s) watercooled as well for this one. A standard dual slot air cooled card really cuts down the SATA connectivity. Which begs the questions, why have vertical SATA ports?

Ain't this AM3+ socket dead? If I recall correctly AMD is no more going to release any new processors for this platform unless Sapphires knows otherwise. I really do like the idea of the FC block. I am skeptical about the success of this board at this moment in time.

I still have a PC running on a AM3+ socket at home, although most of my workstations are all based on 2011 socket Intel i7 with quadros.

Odd that they would release something like this so late in the game for AM3+ platform. I mean at least last year you could have said this would be awesome to combo with a FX 9370/9590 chip but right now I feel its a bit late in the game. Maybe there is something we don't know coming soon but I feel this is odd to come out at this point.

Ain't this AM3+ socket dead? If I recall correctly AMD is no more going to release any new processors for this platform unless Sapphires knows otherwise. I really do like the idea of the FC block. I am skeptical about the success of this board at this moment in time.

I still have a PC running on a AM3+ socket at home, although most of my workstations are all based on 2011 socket Intel i7 with quadros.

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AMD never said so. they only said there wont be any new processors for this financial year.

If they do release new CPU's they need a new chipset to go with them the 990fx is far far beihind

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It's not that far behind except for that fact that it's still using PCI-E 2.0. Consider for a moment that it offers 38 PCI-E lanes total, (8/8/8/8/4/1/1 max). Assuming AMD were to release a new chipset, it probably would use a newer revision of HyperTransport, have a lower TDP, and use PCI-E 3.0.

990FX is just the PCI-E root complex plus the communication (via dedicated PCI-E lanes no less,) for the south bridge. The 990FX is more like Intel's IOH (I/O Hub) on skt1366 where Intel used QPI between the CPU and the IOH to provide PCI-E lanes where now the PCH is more like a glorified south bridge.

I think what you're really complaining about is the shortcomings of the SB950 (the south bridge which offers USB, SATA, etc) which really only lacks USB 3.0 since it supports 6 SATA3 (6gb) ports already and 4x PCI-E 2.0 is more than enough to drive that.

I suspect by the time AMD is ready to release a new processor for this socket (assuming it's not dead), they'll have a new chipset/south bridge combo to go along with it, unless they take the route Intel has been going and moves the PCI-E root complex to the CPU like they did on their APUs where the FCH is really like Intel's PCH; an over glorified south bridge. Although AMD would have to completely change the platform if they did decide to move the PCI-E root complex to the CPU, so I doubt that would happen unless it was a completely new socket.

Edit: On a side note, I would like to see AMD merge the chipset and the south bridge if they hold on to the 939/AM2/AM2+/AM3/AM3+ socket design. HyperTransport would offer more than enough bandwidth to offer any kind of high performance I/O. I think people need to consider that AMD offered a lot of PCI-E lanes for the price on the 790FX, 890FX and 990FX.

Intel's philosophy has been to base the platform on the CPU. AMD's for AM3+ and prior was to base the CPU on the platform. Assuming CPUs were the same speed, I'm not sure which philosophy would be better. I kind of like the idea of getting a cheap CPU but a decent priced motherboard just to get a ton of PCI-E slots. To get a ton of PCI-E slots with an Intel CPU, you're looking at a good chunk of change for the hardware in comparison to AMD, so from a price perspective AMD really has the one up. The problem is that they can't get their shit together with their CPUs. I almost feel like Bulldozer was a waste a time (albeit an ambitious project,) and that they would have been better off doing what Intel did and simply their core and reduce the length of the pipeline. Branch prediction can be a bitch and adding more stages to the pipeline makes it worse and stalls only hit you harder.